By Nikki Babri
Clovis Hung was 13 – the age of most eighth graders – when he enrolled at UC Irvine. This June, at 15 years old, he will make history as the youngest person to graduate from UCI’s School of Humanities. In the meantime, his mom still drives him over an hour from Diamond Bar four days a week for class. After all, he’s not old enough to get his learner’s permit yet.
Clovis is finishing a bachelor’s degree in history and a minor in anthropology. Both, he’ll tell you, come down to curiosity about people and the world they’ve made. He has been trying to satisfy that curiosity since he was a young child and he hasn’t stopped yet.
“Environment and curiosity are what drive me,” he reflects. “When I’m in an environment that pushes me, I want to keep going.”
Breaking records early
In second grade, Clovis was already passionate about history. So he asked his mother, Song Choi, if he could take a college course. Choi, a longtime tutor, had noticed early on that her son absorbed new material almost as fast as she could teach it. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period when many students across the world fell behind academically, Choi was homeschooling Clovis full-time and his pace only quickened.
In fall 2020, at age nine, Clovis enrolled in his first college course at Fullerton College through the school’s Special Admit Program. “After that first history class, I found out I could handle it well and instantly fell in love with college life,” he said at the time. “So, I challenged myself to take more classes.”
By spring 2023, at 12, he had earned five associate degrees and became Fullerton’s youngest graduate on record. “The pace moved very fast,” Choi recalls. “We never planned any of this. It just happened naturally.”
From there, he enrolled at UC Irvine at 13, becoming one of the youngest Anteaters in the university’s 60-year history.
The world is his classroom
When people learn that a 15-year-old is graduating from a research university, they often assume a STEM degree, and with Clovis, it’s not an unreasonable guess. He’s always been interested in aviation and aerospace engineering, and has spent hours watching videos about how airplanes are engineered. Outside of UCI, he’s a Second Lieutenant in Civil Air Patrol, the U.S. Air Force’s civilian auxiliary that first sparked his love of flying, and is a member of the Drone Club at Fullerton College. He’s also working toward his private pilot’s license, and at 16 will be eligible for his first solo flight.
But history won out, and the reason is simple: he loves to travel. His family makes it work on a budget with low-cost airlines, inexpensive local food courts and modest hotels, but the sacrifice is worth it. “Nothing can replace the experience of traveling,” shares Choi, who values real-world learning over textbooks.
Clovis has visited 37 countries – a number that would be impressive at any age – and, before each trip, reads up on the history of wherever he’s going. Before he visited Rome, he had already taken courses on Roman history, recalling them as he walked around the Coliseum. This August, he’s headed to Bolivia, Chile, Peru and El Salvador, bringing the tally to 41. “Every time I go to a certain place, I really want to dive deeper into its history,” he explains.
His minor in anthropology fits naturally alongside it. He originally enrolled at UCI as an anthropology major before switching to history, and kept the minor because it never stopped feeling relevant. “Anthropology is the study of humans, the study of expressions,” he says. “You’re able to communicate with people.”
For Clovis, the humanities have always had a clear practical application. “History lets you understand things from other people’s perspectives,” he says. “As a humanities major, you have to read actively, absorb information and write. It’s really based on communicating with different people, different communities.” He also sees a direct line between that and flying commercially. “If I go into commercial airlines, I’ll fly to other countries,” he points out. “And I’ll be able to understand that country’s history.”
His favorite courses tend to have less to do with the subject matter than with the person teaching it. In a class on Captain Cook, Professor of History Patricia Seed brought paintings, drawings and models of boats to the classroom, visibly absorbed in her own material. A class with Salvador Zárate, an assistant professor of anthropology, on undocumented Mexican labor left a similar impression.
For someone driven entirely by passion and curiosity, it’s the quality Clovis notices most. “It’s not about the course itself,” he says. “It’s more of how the professor teaches.”
Eye on the target
Outside of his coursework, Clovis took up archery at 12 and has been competing on UCI’s Archery Club for nearly two years. The appeal, he says, is the discipline it demands. “I love being consistent,” he explains, and archery, more than most sports, rewards exactly that. “During competitions you have to make sure you’re mentally strong so that you’re able to perform. You have to overcome that nervousness and shoot every shot accurately and consistently.”
The discipline shows up in the details, and Clovis keeps a meticulous Google Calendar to manage everything. Awake at 5:30 a.m. on most days, his weeks fill quickly: Chinese class and archery four times a week, Civil Air Patrol and the final stretch of his Eagle Scout requirements. At home, he unwinds with video games like Spider-Man, Battlefield and NBA 2K26.
Somewhere in those two years, he also managed a semester abroad at National Taiwan University. He took atmospheric sciences and traditional Chinese courses, joined the running club and found the archery club there, too. He was 14, so his mom – who kept up her tutoring work remotely throughout – lived with him for the months-long program. “I made a lot of new friends,” he says. “International students from the Czech Republic, American students from North Carolina and everywhere in between. A lot of different places.”
The age gap that defined his experience at Fullerton, where he enrolled at nine years old, has quietly receded. These days, he finds himself going to breakfast with teammates and walking through campus without a second glance. “They treat me as a normal person,” he says.
His mother has watched the change unfold. “A few years ago it was very obvious,” she says. “People would ask him, ‘What are you doing here?’ But now nobody asks. He just looks like a teenager.”
Ready for takeoff
Clovis is nowhere near done with school. This fall, he’ll begin a Bachelor of Science degree in Drone Development and Autonomous Systems at Fullerton College along with bridging courses in chemistry and physics to keep the door open to a master’s in aerospace engineering.
In ten years, he sees himself as a commercial pilot, though he knows the path there is long – ground school, an FAA exam, training programs and plenty of certificates. He already has a Microsoft Flight Simulator and a drone lined up for practice. Then again, ten years has proven to be plenty of time for Clovis before. A decade ago, he was just starting kindergarten.
His mother is measured about all of it. People have called her a “tiger mom,” she says, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. “You can’t beg somebody to do something they don’t like,” she explains. Traditional timelines and graduate degrees don’t concern her, either. “As long as he’s happy and he has the passion, he can learn anything. He’s so young – just let him explore more. He can always do that later.”
Clovis will walk at the School of Humanities commencement ceremony on June 14. After that, the sky (quite literally) is the limit.
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